93 A CR.ITIC AT LAR.GE THE DAR.K CONTINENT OF HENR.Y STANLEY H ENRY MORTON STANLEY wrote three great books of travel and exploration: "How I Found Livingstone" (1872), "Through the Dark Continent" (1878), and "In Darkest Africa" (1890). All three were an immense success, selling hun- dreds of thousands of copies and mak- ing Stanley a wealthy man. Now only one-CCThrough the Dark Conti- nent," which is available in a Dover paperback facsimile edition-remains in print. This is unfortunate, because all three, especially if they are read with some biographical guidance, are per- fectly marvellous. Part of what makes them so good is that they are written with dated entries, as if they were journals. During his trips, Stanley did keep careful journals, under almost im- possible conditions, and the books con- sist of his edited selections. (The jour- nals on which "Through the Dark Continent" was based were published by Vanguard Press in 1 961. The others are in the M usée Royal de l' Afrique Centrale, in Belgium. For its own rea- sons, the museum has refused permis- sion to reprint or quote extensively from them, but a microfilm copy at the British Library is available to schol- ars.) The journal form preserves the illusion that Stanley did not know the outcome of the events he was writing about-who had survived and who had died, who had behaved well and who had broken, what had been accom- plished and what had failed-and the quality of immediacy thus attained adds much to the books' appeal. One of the most remarkable entries is from "Through the Dark Conti- nent" and is dated May 28, 1877. To set the stage: Two and a half years earlier-on November 12, 1874- Stanley had sailed from the island of Zanzibar as the leader of the largest expedition ever to attempt an explora- tion of the African interior. With him were three European assistants and some three hundred porters, guides, and armed Zanzibari soldiers. A forty- foot boat named the Lady Alice, with which Stanley intended to explore the inland waters, was transported in sec- tions. Once the expedition had landed on the continent's east coast, it formed a procession half a mile long. What Â..-" ., - · ,. ,,-.'1 0" r; Stanley hoped to do was to cross the continent, and in the process he intend- ed to settle once and for all the origin of the White Nile. (The Blue Nile, which joins the White Nile in Khar- toum, was already known to rise in the Ethiopian highlands.) Despite the ef- forts of such explorers as Richard Bur- ton, John Speke, James Grant, Flo- rence and Samuel Baker, and David Livingstone, this was still an open question. Indeed, Stanley saw his mis- sion as completing the work of Liv- ingstone, who had died the previous spring. Stanley was thirty-three. By this time, he had become world famous as the man who "found" Livingstone; he had come upon the Doctor in the village of Ujiji, on the northeast shore of Lake Tanganyika, on November 10, 1871. In later life, Stanley told a visitor that he had said "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" because he couldn't think of anything else to say. Livingstone was not lost when Stan- ley found him-he knew perfectly well where he was-but he was at the end of his rope. He had been in the interior for five and a half years, and during most of that time had been in contact with the civilized world by letter. But the letters had stopped in 1869. His disappearance had greatly alarmed not only the Royal Geographical Society, in London, which sponsored his expe- ditions, but the general public; Liv- ingstone's books on his African explo- rations had made him a Victorian hero. Re was engaged in a pilgrimage- inspired by the Biblical story of Moses -to find the source of the White Nile, and he had persuaded himself that it was a river called the Lualaba, which lay to the east of Lake Tanganyika and flowed north at that latitude. (This later proved to be the Congo.) He reached a river town called N yangwe, but was unable to get the canoes he needed; desperately ill with dysentery, malaria, and a host of other diseases that beset all African explorers, and short of medicine, he decided to return to Ujiji, where he hoped to be resupplied. No shipments awaited him there, but, as luck would have it, five days after his return, Stanley, then a correspondent for the New York Her- ald, arrived with abundant supplies. In an unguarded moment, Livingstone re- ferred to the Herald as a "despicable" newspaper. Stanley records the adjec- tive in his journal but leaves it out of llll o ; i' f @ '., - ' ' , Þ!; "" , " w ",I I . ,.. ." ,.,- / ï":': ;,. - "Do you, Scofield Industries, take Amalgamated Pipe?"